Alice's first bake: Tea soaked fruit cake

After three years living in Paris, I thought it would only be fitting to attempt a French-themed bake for my first post on this blog. Unfortunately this plan altered when my mother thrust a National Trust recipe into my hand this morning. Oh well, I thought, France can wait another week. After all, we'll always have Paris. 


I present to you a 'tea soaked fruit cake' (for original recipe click here). Before baking, I was under the impression that any cake could become a tea cake when accompanied with said beverage, but it appears I was mistaken.

Ingredients. You can just spot the tea bags infusing the fruit.

Ingredients:

• 8 tea bags 
• 300ml boiling water
• 500g mixed dried fruit
• 500g self-raising flour 
• 325g butter or margarine
• 250g caster sugar
• 2tsp ground mixed spice 
• 5 eggs 
• 1tsp salt 

Method: 

1. Place the tea bags in a large bowl and add the boiling water. Stir to make a very strong tea then add the mixed dried fruit and stir well, leave to soak until the liquid is cold. If you leave the fruit to soak overnight this will impart more of the tea flavour to the fruit. 

Appearance-wise, this step was very unappealing. I thought better of the first image on this blog being teabag-soaked dried fruit. 

2. Once cool, remove the tea bags, give the fruit a stir and then put to one side.

3. Pre-heat your oven to 175°C (155°C fan, 340°F, gas mark 3–4) then grease and line a 23cm (9”) springform cake tin.

4. Place the flour and butter or margarine in a large bowl and use your fingers to rub the fat into the flour until evenly distributed and the mix looks like breadcrumbs. 

At this stage, hand-deep in breadcrumb mixture, a five minute studio instrumental version from The Cure's Disintegration album came on which was mildly frustrating. 

As far as I could get before having to change songs.

5. Add the sugar and mixed spice, then stir well. 

6. Add the eggs and the soaked fruit, along with any remaining liquid and stir until evenly combined. 

Thoughts: I need to invest in a bigger bowl.

Mmm, raw cake mixture. How attractive.

7. Pour the mixture into your cake tin and level the top, place in the oven and bake for around an hour or until the cake is risen, golden and a skewer inserted into the middle comes out clean. 

This process actually lasted approx one and a half hours, for some reason only one half of the cake was cooked through and it took a lot of tin foil and skewer-ings to assure it was properly baked.

8. Remove from the oven and leave to cool.

Et voilà - the finished cake. Note the impressively even fruit distribution, I surprised myself.

Bella's review:
I usually hate both fruit cake and tea, so I didn't have high hopes for this one! However, it has a really good flavour and was really moist, so I'd definitely eat it again. I also gave a slice to my dad who is a slight fruitcake connoisseur, and he was a big fan too. Success! 

Mystery guest review: 
The cake was delicious, there were a couple of crunchy raisins or something but how was Alice to know. You can really taste the tea. When it was finished, I felt slightly melancholy. A bittersweet experience 8/10.